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The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

midnightmurmurations.substack.com

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Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#11

Post by c-hendricks »

nickphx wrote: post #7
saltyoldman wrote: post #4

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…

I am not sure where you experienced the 90s or at what age, but your experience is the opposite of mine.

They mention being a teenager then, so a lot of their feelings might come down to "it was fun being a teenager" sprinkled with some effects of late stage capitalism.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#12

Post by detribaby »

There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?

One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.

You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.

For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.

The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#13

Post by andrewstuart »

I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.

The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.

Tech was exciting, futuristic.

Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.

People talked socialized read books.

Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.

The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#14

Post by ramesh31 »

saltyoldman wrote: post #4

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…

>Music was incredible

Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#15

Post by gib444 »

saltyoldman wrote: post #4

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…

Not to forget cheap housing !

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#17

Post by travelalberta »

stackghost wrote: post #6
saltyoldman wrote: post #4

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…

I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint. It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle. I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as…

It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#18

Post by SilentM68 »

Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#19

Post by happytoexplain »

toyg wrote: post #5
rhelz wrote: post #2

Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package. There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.

And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.

As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Reading a summary of "third way triangulation" makes it sound good.

Re: The X-Files has made me nostalgic for a time I never experienced

#20

Post by Anonyneko »

saltyoldman wrote: post #4

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization". * Music was incredible * Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least * Homelessness was pretty much non-existent * People were friendly and had time for strangers * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z) * Jobs actu…

My country had a complete economic collapse in the 90s and people could barely afford food, so mileage varies.

As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).

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